


(don't want to) just make boards

by patrokla



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: Canon Gay Character, Canon Gay Relationship, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Episode: s01e07 Allie's Rules, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, M/M, just a tad...this is less unhappy than it sounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 01:32:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18906781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: Grizz is always prepared, until he isn't.





	(don't want to) just make boards

**Author's Note:**

> My current thoughts on "The Society": not enough Grizz. Or Bean.
> 
> Title and excerpts from Frank O'Hara's "Poem En Forme de Saw." Spoilers through the whole first season.

_I wanted to be alone_  
_which is why I went to the mill in the first place_  
_now I am alone and hate it_  
_I don't want to just make boards for the rest of my life_

_—_

Grizz has always liked to be prepared. He was a Boy Scout, back in the day, got all the way up to Life Scout before the whole gay thing started clashing with the scout thing and then he’d dropped out. Anyway, the point is - he likes to know what he’s doing.  
  
He actually thinks he _does_ know what he’s doing for all of three days in this weird alternate universe, and then Emily gets bitten by a snake and he realizes he knows just enough to be totally fucking useless. All those years playing prepared in the woods, and he knows enough to know they need a doctor, a hospital, an adult. Not him, not Grizz.  
  
It’s a testament to the fact that he’s spent his high school years building a career of knowing and doing shit that nobody really blames him for her death. They all think he did as much as he could, which is true, but - she still died. There was more that could’ve been done. He just wasn’t capable of doing it.  
  
It’s easy, after that, to focus on being part of the Guard. Enforcing laws (of a sort) and order (barely), and sure, maybe he hadn’t planned for his post-high school career to involve a stint in a paramilitary police force in a fucked-up version of his home town, but weirdly, he’s sort of prepared for it. All that football was good for something.  
  
And then Cassandra is murdered. Everything - the displacement, the danger - it had all felt real to him close to the start, to him and the few others who’d seen Emily die. But Cassandra’s death, messy and visible for days after, until Will and Allie go to scrub the blood away, is a wake-up call to everyone else. Shit gets real. Real fucking real.  
  
Too fucking real, as it turns out. Grizz has a - he has a limit, for reality, for violence. Football built him up, made him good at teamwork, good at casual touches and absolutely no glances in the locker room. It didn’t prepare him to shoot someone. A classmate. A murderer. A kid he’s known his whole life, peripherally.  
  
He’s not prepared to kill. He won’t be ashamed of that. He wishes Allie wasn’t the one to take his place, but there are no good options, not really. This is a whole universe made of bad options and bad choices. He listens to the gunfire, and brings Allie tea and holds her hand in his own. Two hands. One, a killer. And the other?  
  
He doesn’t leave the Guard, after that. It doesn’t exactly seem like an option, even if he wanted to - which he doesn’t. But he does talk Gordie into putting him on the work schedule for gardening every couple of days, and that helps. It feels good to bury his hands in the dirt and help create. They’ve had too many funerals, too many handfuls of dry earth dropped onto plastic. But this, dark, rich dirt and tendriling greens, coaxing the pea plants into climbing trellises and pulling up vegetables - it makes West Ham feel a little like home again.  
  
—

Sam is another thing he isn’t prepared for. Grizz had always planned on coming out in college, safely away at UC Santa Barbara, or Stanford, or maybe even UW. It’s not that he thought he needed the distance of a whole continent to feel safe to do it, it’s just - why borrow trouble? It’s practical, really. Being gay in high school, on the football team...he doesn’t need that kind of hassle.  
  
So yeah, he’d played at straight for a few years, before it started to feel pointless and a little nauseating, and then he’d kept his hands and eyes to himself. But he’d known about Sam. Everyone knew about Sam, just like everyone knew about Campbell. The older Eliot brother was best avoided by anyone with a brain or sense of empathy. And the younger? Also best avoided - by Grizz, anyhow. If he did look, occasionally, accidentally, in the cafeteria or out on the green, well. He didn’t think anyone would tell Sam.  
  
He never expects wanting to tell Sam himself. He could never have predicted that he’d get trapped with all the friends he’d planned on never seeing again, all the people he was ready to be shed of, the trappings of a life he’d always meant to be temporary. He wears his letterman jacket everywhere. He spends his days with Clark and Luke and the rest of his teammates. His plan, his logical, carefully constructed plan, just feels like a trap now. He may never graduate high school. He may never go to college. He may never -  
  
He checks the library work schedule and goes in on one of Sam’s rare days off. The library has been good to Grizz in the past. It has hundreds of books of classical philosophy and poetry, five different translations of the Iliad, and seven of the Odyssey. And it only has one fucking book on sign language. Well, fine. He’ll take it.  
  
—  
  
Sign language is difficult, and he is an idiot, and Sam - Sam seems to like him anyway. They sit in Grizz’s room, the private one he gets for as a member of the Guard, and Grizz pushes the words out through the nervous butterflies in his stomach. _How do you say ‘kiss me’?_  
  
The gentle press of Sam’s lips against his, the warm hand that comes up to cradle his jaw, the look in Sam’s eyes when he pulls back to check, to see if he liked it - Grizz wasn’t prepared for it. He hadn’t known to be. He’d never thought - he’d kissed girls before, and he’d never thought -  
  
They move fast. Faster than Grizz thinks he ever would’ve back on real Earth, but then again, maybe not. Maybe he and Sam would’ve found each other there, too. Maybe he still would’ve wandered towards Sam at prom, tipsy enough to forget his plans, to forget to stay away. Maybe he would’ve gotten caught in Sam’s gravity, again, and not bothered to try and pull himself back into empty space.  
  
This was never his plan.  
  
He thinks maybe that’s okay.

—

 

 _Alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm_  
t _hat's not really being alone, is it, signed The Saw_


End file.
